Download Confederation Period-Brinkley

The Confederation Period
by Alan Brinkley
This reading is excerpted from Chapter Five of Brinkley’s American History: A Survey (10th ed.). I
wrote the footnotes. If you use the questions below to guide your note taking (which is a good idea),
please be aware that several of the questions have multiple answers.
Study Questions
1. What big ideas were the foundation of early American government? Why? (This question covers most of the
first two pages of the reading.)
2. What were the goals of those who wrote the Articles of Confederation?
3. How do the Articles reflect those goals?
4. What problems had to be overcome before the Articles could be put into effect?
5. The government established by the Articles is often seen as a failure. What are the arguments for and against this
position?
6. In what ways did the Northwest land settlement change the landscape of the United States?
7. What do the Northwest land ordinances reveal about the principles of the new nation?
8. Why do you think representatives from slaveholding states would vote to approve a ban on slavery in the
Northwest?
THE CREATION OF STATE GOVERNMENTS
At the same time that Americans were struggling to win their independence on the battlefield,
they were also struggling to create new institutions of governments for themselves, to replace the
British system they had repudiated. That effort continued for more than fifteen years,
culminating in the federal Constitution of 1789. But its most crucial phase occurred during the
war itself, and at the state, not the national, level.
The formation of state governments began early in 1776, even before the adoption of the
Declaration of Independence. At first, the new state constitutions reflected primarily the fear of
bloated executive power that had become so pronounced during the 1760s and early 1770s.1
Gradually, however, Americans began to become equally concerned about the instability of a
government too responsive to the popular will. In a second phase of state constitution writing,
therefore, they gave renewed attention to the idea of balance in government.
The Assumptions of Republicanism
If Americans agreed on nothing else when they began to build new governments for themselves,
they agreed that those governments would be republican. 2 To them, that meant a political system
in which all power came directly from the people, rather than from some supreme authority (such
as a king) standing above them. The success of any government, therefore, depended on the
nature of its citizenry. If the population consisted of sturdy, virtuous, independent property
owners, then the republic could survive. If it consisted of a few powerful aristocrats and a great
1 As
seen in the Stamp, Tea, and Intolerable Acts, amongst others, that had so outraged the colonists.
Note the lower-case “r.” If you spell “Republican” with a capital letter you are referring to the political party of
Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. If you use the lower-case you are referring to the idea of
republicanism. This is an important distinction to master.
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mass of dependent workers, then it would be in danger. From the beginning, therefore, the ideal
of the small “freeholder” became basic to American political ideology.
Another crucial part of that ideology was the concept of equality. The Declaration of
Independence had given voice to that idea in its most ringing phrase: “all men are created equal.”
It was a belief that stood in direct contrast to the old European assumption of an inherited
aristocracy. Every citizen, Americans believed, was born in a position of equality with every
other citizen. The innate talents and energies of individuals would determine their roles in
society, not their position at birth. The republican vision did not, in other words, envision a
society without social gradations.3
Some people would inevitably be wealthier and more
powerful than others. But all people would have to earn their success. There would be no
equality of condition, but there would be full equality of opportunity.
In reality, of course, these assumptions could not always be sustained. The United States was
never to become a nation in which all (or even most) people were independent property holders.
From the beginning, there was a large dependent labor force—of which the white members were
allowed many of the privileges of citizenship and the black members had virtually no rights at
all. American women remained both politically and economically subordinate, with few
opportunities for advancement independent of their husbands.
Native Americans were
systematically exploited and displaced by whites hungry for land and impatient with legalities….
Nevertheless, in embracing the assumptions of republicanism, Americans were adopting a
powerful, even revolutionary new ideology, one that would enable them to create a form of
government never before seen in the world. Their experiment in statecraft became a model for
many other countries and made the United States the most admired and studied nation on earth.4
The First State Constitutions
Two of the original thirteen states5 saw no need to produce new constitutions…. The other
eleven states, however, chose to create entirely new governments. In doing so, they set out to
avoid the problems of the British system they were repudiating.
The first and perhaps most basic decision was that the American constitutions, unlike the
English one, were to be written down. Americans believed that the vagueness of the English
system had opened the way to the corruption of the British government. To avoid a similar fate,
they insisted that their own governments rest on clearly stated and permanently inscribed laws,
so that no individual or group could pervert them.
The second decision was that the power of the executive, which Americans believed had
grown bloated and threatening in England (and even, at times, in the colonies), must be limited.
One state—Pennsylvania—went so far as to eliminate the executive altogether. But most states
inserted provisions sharply limiting the power of the governor over appointments, reducing or
eliminating his right to veto bills, and preventing him from dismissing or otherwise interfering
with the legislature. Above all, every state forbade the governor or any other executive officer
from holding a seat in the legislature, thus ensuring that (unlike in England) the two branches of
3
That is, without social classes. There were no commies creating early American government.
“And we shall be as a City upon a Hill…”
5 Connecticut and Rhode Island
4
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government would remain wholly separate. The constitutions also added provisions protecting
the judiciary from executive control, although in most states the courts did not yet emerge as
fully autonomous branches of government.
In limiting the executive and expanding the power of the legislature, the new constitutions
were moving in the direction of direct popular rule. They did not, however, move all the way.
Only in Georgia and Pennsylvania did the legislature consist of one house. In all the other states
there was an upper and a lower chamber, and in most cases, the upper chamber was designed to
represent the “higher orders” of society. In all states, there were property requirements for
voters—in some states, only the modest amount that would qualify a person as a taxpayer, in
other states somewhat greater requirements. Universal suffrage (even among white men) was
not yet an accepted part of American government….
THE SEARCH FOR A NATIONAL GOVERNMENT
Americans were much quicker to agree on the proper shape of their state institutions than they
were to decide on the form of their national government. At first most believed that the central
government should remain relatively weak and unimportant. Each state would be virtually a
sovereign nation, and national institutions would serve only as loose, coordinating mechanisms,
with little independent authority. Such beliefs reflected the assumption that a republic operated
best in a relatively limited, homogeneous area; that were a republican government to attempt to
administer too large and diverse a nation, it would flounder. It was in response to such ideas that
the Articles of Confederation emerged.
The Confederation
No sooner did the Continental Congress appoint a committee to draft a declaration of
independence in 1776 than it appointed another to draft a plan of union. After much debate and
many revisions, the Congress adopted the committee’s proposal in November 1777 as the
Articles of Confederation.
The Articles provided for a national political structure very similar to the one already in
operation. Congress was to survive as the central—indeed the only—institution of national
authority. But its powers were to be somewhat expanded. It was to have the authority to conduct
wars and foreign relations, and to appropriate, borrow, and issue money. But it could not
regulate trade, draft troops, or levy taxes directly on the people. For troops and taxes it would
have to make formal requests to the state legislatures, which could and often did refuse them.
There was to be no separate executive (the “president of the United States” was merely the
presiding officer at the sessions of Congress). Each state would have a single vote in Congress,
and at least nine of the states would have to approve any important measure. All thirteen state
legislatures would have to approve the Articles before they could be ratified or amended.
The ratification process revealed broad disagreements over the plan. The small states had
insisted on equal state representation, but the larger states wanted representation based on
population. More important, the states claiming western lands wished to keep them, but the rest
of the states demanded that all such territory be turned over to the Confederation government.
[See map next page.] When New York and Virginia finally agreed to give up their western
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Maps: Bedford/St. Martin’s
claims, Maryland (the only state still holding out) approved the Articles of Confederation. They
went into effect in 1781.
The Confederation, which existed from 1781 until 1789, was not the complete failure that
subsequent accounts often described. But it was far from a success. Lacking adequate powers to
deal with interstate issues or to enforce its will on the states, and lacking sufficient stature in the
eyes of the world to be able to negotiate effectively, it suffered a series of damaging setbacks.
Diplomatic Failures
Evidence of the low esteem in which the rest of the world held the Confederation made it
difficult to persuade Great Britain (and, to a lesser extent, Spain) to live up to the terms of the
peace treaty of 1783. 6
6
This Peace Treaty, one of many peace agreements in history known as the Treaty of Paris, ended the Revolutionary
War. It gave the United States all the territory indicated in the map above.
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The British had promised to evacuate American soil, but British forces continued to occupy a
string of frontier posts along the Great Lakes within the United States. Nor did the British honor
their agreement to make restitution to slaveowners whose slaves the British army had
confiscated. There were also disputes over the northeastern boundary of the new nation and over
the border between the United States and Florida, which Britain had ceded back to Spain in the
treaty. And there were diplomatic problems involving American commerce. Freed from
imperial regulations, it was expanding in new directions, but most American trade remained
within the British Empire. Americans wanted full access to British markets; England, however,
placed sharp postwar restrictions on that access.
In 1784, Congress sent John Adams as minister to London to resolve these differences, but
Adams made no headway with the English, who could never be sure whether he represented a
single nation or thirteen different ones. Throughout the 1780s, the British government refused
even to return the courtesy of sending a minister to the American capital.
In dealing with the Spanish government, the Confederation demonstrated similar weakness.
Its diplomats agreed to a treaty with Spain in 1786 that accepted the American interpretation of
the Florida boundary in return for American recognition of Spanish possessions in North
American and an agreement that the United States would limit its right to navigate the
Mississippi for twenty years. But the southern states, incensed at the idea of giving up their
access to the Mississippi, blocked ratification.
The Confederation and the Northwest
The Confederation’s most important accomplishment was its resolution of some of the
controversies involving the western lands—although even this was a partial and ambiguous
achievement.
When the Revolution began, only a few thousand whites lived west of the Appalachian
divide7; by 1790 their numbers had increased to 120,000. The Confederation had to find a way
to include these new settlements in the political structure of the new nation. The western settlers
were already often in conflict with the established centers of the East over Indian policies, trade
provisions, and taxes. At times, in fact,… there had been overt hostilities between eastern and
western peoples. Congress faced the additional difficulty of competing with state governments
for jurisdiction over the trans-Appalachian region. When Virginia first ceded its western territory
to Congress in 1781 (a cession not finally concluded until 1784), the other land-rich states began
to yield their claims to the Confederation as well. By 1784 the states had ceded enough land to
the Confederation to permit Congress to begin making policy for the national domain.
The Ordinance of 1784, based on a proposal by Thomas Jefferson, divided the western
territory into ten self-governing districts, each of which could petition Congress for statehood
when its population equaled the number of free inhabitants of the smallest existing state. Then,
in the Ordinance of 1785, Congress created a system for surveying and selling the western lands.
The territory north of the Ohio River would be surveyed and marked off into neat rectangular
townships. (This grid system established a pattern that would leave an indelible mark on the
American landscape and, through it, the American economy—see the map on the next page and
7
This may well have been a lingering effect of Britain’s Proclamation Line of 1763.
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the photos at the end of the reading.) In every township four of 36 sections would be reserved
for the national government; the revenue from the sale of one of the others would support the
creation of a public school (the first example of federal aid to education). Sections were to be
sold at auction for no less than one dollar an acre. Since there were 640 acres in a section, the
prospective buyer of government land had to have at least $640—a very large sum by the
standards of the day. The original ordinances proved highly favorable to land speculator sand
less so to ordinary settlers, many of whom could not afford to buy the land. Congress
compounded the problem by selling much of the best land to the Ohio and Scioto companies
(land speculation operations) before making it available to anyone else. 8 Criticism of these
8
Proof positive that our government has almost always been in the business of making sweetheart deals that benefit
business. But I digress….
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policies led to the passage in 1787 of another law governing western settlement—legislation that
became known as the “Northwest Ordinance.”
The new ordinance abandoned the ten districts established in 1784 and created a single
Northwest Territory out of the lands north of the Ohio; the territory might subsequently be
divided into three to five territories. It also specified a population of 60,000 as a minimum for
statehood, guaranteed freedom of religion and the right of trial by jury to residents of the
Northwest, and prohibited slavery throughout the territory.
The western lands south of the Ohio River received less attention from Congress, and
development was more chaotic there. The region that became Kentucky and Tennessee
developed rapidly in the late 1770s and in the 1780s speculators and settlers began setting up
governments and asking for recognition as states. The Confederation Congress was never able to
resolve the conflicting claims in that region successfully. But in the Northwest Territory, the
western land policies of the Confederation created a system that—on paper at least—brought
order and stability to the process of white settlement.
The photo at left shows farmland in Orange County, NC. Land boundaries follow rivers, hill
contours, and other natural patterns. In the photo at right, which shows farmland in Ohio, one
can see the pattern established by surveyors working to create the sections called for in the
various Northwest land laws. In Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and other midwestern states, straight
lines rule. If you drive west from Pennsylvania into Ohio you can watch the change occur.
Images: co.orange.nc.us (left); airphotona.com (right)
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